By John Prager
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| We'll loan you this.... |
Unfortunately for
Trump, the museum said ‘America First.’
The museum curator,
Nancy Spector, said the museum could not accommodate Trump’s request for Van
Gogh’s 1888 work, “Landscape With Snow,” and instead offered Trump another
painting that was nothing like it or something that is, perhaps, more
appropriate — a fully-functional and well-used 18-karat gold toilet titled
“America.”
For a year, the
Guggenheim placed the piece in a public restroom on the fifth floor for
visitors to use.
Spector says that the toilet was available “should the
President and First Lady have any interest in installing it in the White
House.”
Spector, who is not
fond of Trump, tells the Washington Post the artist “would like to offer it to the
White House for a long-term loan.”
“It is, of course,
extremely valuable and somewhat fragile, but we would provide all the
instructions for its installation and care,” she adds.
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| ...But not this |
This offer is
particularly hilarious because while The Donald is known for collecting
gold-plated fixtures, he is also a notorious germaphobe who is unlikely to
accept anything that has been previously used — especially by “more than one
hundred thousand people” who “waited patiently in line for the opportunity to
commune with art and with nature.”
Will Trump accept the
offer, or does he hate “America?”
Here is the Guggenheim
Museum’s explanation of the art work they offered Donald Trump instead of the
Van Gogh:
Maurizio Cattelan’s Golden
Toilet in the Time of Trump
Maurizio
Cattelan came out of his self-imposed,
five-year retirement from the art world just in time. His work has always been
prescient, sometimes uncannily so. His life-like wax portrait of Pope Paul II
in full papal regalia lying inert under a felled meteorite—La Nona Ora (The
Ninth Hour) (1999)—presaged the sexual abuse scandals of the Catholic
Church.
AC Forniture Sud (Southern Suppliers FC [Football Club]),
a performative piece from 1991 in which the artist organized an Italian soccer
team exclusively comprising North African immigrants, coincided with the
establishment of a xenophobic political party in Italy. What Cattelan couldn’t
have predicted was the unprecedented number refugees that would land on Italian
shores seeking asylum, or the rising tide of hatred and fear now sweeping Europe
in response.
Cattelan’s 2007 sculpture, Ave Maria, is also shockingly
anticipatory. The work is composed of three white male arms protruding at an
angle from a gallery wall, their precise positions and overt repetition
unmistakably evoking the intense choreography of the “Heil Hitler” salute
(despite the religious inflection of the title). The fact that the appendages
are wearing business attire—a sign, perhaps, of the unabated rise of corporate
power—frighteningly suggests today’s normalization of neo-Nazi ideology here
and abroad.
Enter Cattelan’s “America” (2016), the 18-karat gold, fully functioning toilet
that was installed at the Guggenheim for nearly a year in a long-term,
sculptural performance of interactive art. Like all of Cattelan’s most complex
works, this sculpture is laden with possible meanings.
There is the
art-historical trajectory, from Duchamp and Manzoni to more contemporary
artists like John Miller and Wim Delvoye, that traffics in scatological
iconography. The equation between excrement and art has long been mined by
neo-Marxist thinkers who question the relationship between labor and value.
Expanding upon this economic perspective, there is also the ever-increasing
divide in our country between the wealthy and the poor that threatens the very
stability of our culture. Cattelan explicitly comments on this fact by creating
what he called “one-percent art for the ninety-nine percent.”
The gold toilet—a
cipher for the excesses of affluence—was available for all to use in the
privacy of one of the Guggenheim’s single-stall, gender-neutral bathrooms. More
than one hundred thousand people waited patiently in line for the opportunity
to commune with art and with nature.
Yet it was the Trump reference that resonated so loudly during
the sculpture’s time at the Guggenheim. When the artist proposed the sculpture
in mid-2015, Donald Trump had just announced his bid for the presidency. It was
inconceivable at the time that this business mogul, he of the eponymous gilded
tower, could actually win the White House. When the sculpture came off view on
September 15,
Trump had been in office for 238 days, a term marked by scandal
and defined by the deliberate rollback of countless civil liberties, in
addition to climate-change denial that puts our planet in peril.
That Trump is synonymous with golden toilets was proven not at
the Guggenheim but in a recent satirical pop-up “exhibition” in midtown
Manhattan staged by Trevor Noah of the Daily Show that he called the
“Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library.” In addition to framed tweet
storms, visitors were treated to a “tour” of the Oval Office, where they could
don a Trump wig and pose with an, albeit fake, golden toilet.
Cattelan’s “America,” like all his greatest work, is
at once humorous and searing in its critique of our current realities. Though
crafted from millions of dollars’ worth of gold, the sculpture is actually a
great leveler. As Cattelan has said, “Whatever you eat, a two-hundred-dollar
lunch or a two-dollar hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise.”
Art-wise, the work reached a certain pinnacle of acceptability—or
notoriety—when it was featured on the cover of the New York Post (September
15, 2016) with the headline, “We’re #1 (and #2!),” and an article titled, “The
Guggenheim Wants You to Crap All Over ‘America.’ ” However, Cattelan’s
anticipation of Trump’s America will, perhaps, be the lasting imprint of the
sculpture’s time at the Guggenheim.
Author John Prager is an
unfortunate Liberal soul who lives uncomfortably in the middle of a
Conservative hellscape. Prager spends much of his time poking Trump's
meth-addled, uneducated fans with a pointy stick and is currently writing a
book of muskrat recipes (not really) as well as putting together a scrapbook of
his favorite death threats. His life's aspiration is to rule the world with an
iron fist, or find that sock he's been looking for.Feel free to email him
at notjohnprager@gmail.com if
you have any questions or comments -- or drop him a line on Twitter or Facebook.